Distributed rotational and translational maneuvering of rigid formations and their applications
This work addresses motion control challenges in multi-agent systems, offering a novel approach for applications like target tracking, but it is incremental as it builds on existing gradient control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of rigid formation control for mobile agents by using mismatches in prescribed inter-agent distances as design parameters, resulting in a distributed controller that achieves both formation and motion control, including constant translation and rotation without shape distortion, with experiments demonstrating satisfying performance.
Recently it has been reported that range-measurement inconsistency, or equivalently mismatches in prescribed inter-agent distances, may prevent the popular gradient controllers from guiding rigid formations of mobile agents to converge to their desired shape, and even worse from standing still at any location. In this paper, instead of treating mismatches as the source of ill performance, we take them as design parameters and show that by introducing such a pair of parameters per distance constraint, distributed controller achieving simultaneously both formation and motion control can be designed that not only encompasses the popular gradient control, but more importantly allows us to achieve constant collective translation, rotation or their combination while guaranteeing asymptotically no distortion in the formation shape occurs. Such motion control results are then applied to (a) the alignment of formations orientations and (b) enclosing and tracking a moving target. Besides rigorous mathematical proof, experiments using mobile robots are demonstrated to show the satisfying performances of the proposed formation-motion distributed controller.